The first Biennale of Private Collections has opened in Moscow and across other Russian cities. Among the venues are foundations of private collectors, galleries and cultural centers. Not everyone is ready to show their treasures, but the organizers hope that it will catch on.

The press conference which was to mark the official start of the biennale took place after one of the curated projects had been closed and several others were already open at the same time. The show that closed was ‘The Broken Ring’ from the private art collection of Denis Khimilyaine, one of the most active collectors of contemporary art in St. Petersburg today. He is unlikely to bother about his absence from this platform because his collection of old and new contemporary classics has been well exhibited over the past five years. Khimilyaine is one of few private collectors who independently manages his own social networks: his Facebook page (Facebook belongs to Meta has been declared an extremist organization by the Russian authorities) and Telegram channel are constantly buzzing with long satirical posts about the hard life of a collector in Russia these days.

The organizers of the biennale are no less passionate about art and directly connected with it than the collectors. They are the ‘New Collectors Foundation’ which was established a few years ago by two former museum directors: Marina Loshak, former director of the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in 2013-2023, and Anton Belov, who was the director of the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art for fifteen years and left his post in the spring of 2025; art historian and former director of Sotheby's Russia & CIS Mikhail Kamensky and two entrepreneurs and collectors of contemporary Russian art Ekaterina Lapshina and Anton Kozlov. This group announced the creation of the foundation in the fall of 2023, and at the same time their plans for a new biennale centred in Nizhny Novgorod, although it has taken another two years and a change of HQ to get it off the ground.

At the press conference, Marina Loshak literally sang an ode to collectors, whom she called the main drivers of art, along with artists, and also “freaks in the good sense of the word” as she put it. According to her, Russian collections are huge and amazing and went on to cite at least three collectors who have a passion for rare Steinway & Sons concert grand pianos and rent large hangars to store them! She also cited video art collectors who began to form their collections back in the 1990s, when, at least in Russia, the overwhelming majority were interested only in paintings and tangible art objects. A representative of the latter was, for example, Igor Sukhanov, who opened an exhibition of Russian photography and video art in the Gromov Cultural Center art space in St. Petersburg in April this year.

One of the main projects already running within the framework of the Biennale is the exhibition ‘Under the Same Sky’ at the Moscow cultural foundation In Artibus. It includes works by French and Russian classical artists of the 19th and 20th centuries, including Edgar Degas (1834–1917) and Ilya Repin (1844–1930), Georges Seurat (1859–1891) and Ilya Mashkov (1881–1944), Honoré Daumier (1808–1879), André Derain (1880–1954), Maurice Utrillo (1883–1955). The foundation, like the works in the exhibition, belong to the collector and philanthropist Inna Bazhenova, the former owner of The Art Newspaper and owner of Art Focus Now, whose art collection of old masters has toured European museums. Interest in Russian French art connections lies at the heart of her collection. A few years ago, she told me in an interview that thanks to this line, the theme of colourism appeared in her collection and has become a leitmotif. “Everyone has heard of the concept of colourism, but it is rarely defined. I mean artists-painters who deal with colour, that is, the very foundation of painting. Oddly enough, there are very few such artists in the history of art, although we know entire schools – Flemish, Venetian, French, and Moscow in the previous century. Representatives of these schools make up the collection, which, I think, is not accidental,” she noted. Bazhenova’s Moscow Foundation has already celebrated its tenth anniversary and is thriving today – she regularly talks about her new acquisitions on Instagram (which belongs to Meta, declared an extremist organization by the Russian authorities).

As part of the Biennale Sinara Art in Ekaterinburg is showing an exhibition ‘Outside the Coordinate System’ of works from the private collection of the family of billionaire Dmitry Pumpyansky. It features current classics of unofficial art of the USSR including Erik Bulatov (b. 1933), Ivan Chuikov (1935–2020), Yuri Zlotnikov (1930–2016), Mikhail Roginsky (1931–2004) and Oskar Rabin (1928–2018). And in Vladivostok, the owners of the Arka gallery, Vera and Sergey Glazkov, are showing their own collection of artists from the Primorsky Region, which they began collecting in the early 1990s.

Among the major upcoming Moscow openings are shows of three collections known in Russia and beyond. Andrey Cheglakov, who was also a patron of the relaunch of the Museum of Modern Art MOMus in Thessaloniki, will exhibit part of the contemporary art collection from his own foundation. For his eclectic collection from Alexander Calder (1898–1976) mobiles to theatrical works on paper and Soviet propaganda porcelain such a move into the contemporary will be an interesting challenge.

The three floors of SISTEMA gallery will display the collection of Dmitry Kovalenko who also started to collect in the 1990s. It contains more than one thousand works by Russian artists. “I collect only what I like,” he says. And his personal view and preferences are visible to the naked eye. Kovalenko was the organizer of one of the first Collectors Clubs in Russia.

The Ekaterina Cultural Foundation in the very centre of the Russian capital will not remain on the sidelines either and it will display a selection of works from the collection of its owners Ekaterina and Vladimir Semenikhin, known for many exhibition projects at the Grimaldi Forum in Monaco. Their list of assets includes classics, Russian avant-garde and Western and Russian contemporary art, an eclectic roster of artists from Fyodor Matveyev (1758–1826) and Pyotr Konchalovsky (1876–1956) to Erik Bulatov, AES+F group, Marc Quinn (b. 1964) and Tony Matelli (b. 1971).

The Biennale will continue until the end of the year in other cities across the nation. Viewers will have access to private treasures of collectors from St. Petersburg and Nizhny Novgorod, Veliky Novgorod and Vladimir, Kazan and Kaluga, Suzdal, Tomsk and Ufa.